In the fall of 1996, I sat inside weekly strategy meetings of conservative activists as part of research for my book, 'Gang of Five,' chronicling the rise of the baby-boomer Right.

One of my most vivid memories from 1974 was the gas station at the foot of the hill below my Southern California high school - car lines snaking out into the street, heralding the failure of the government's price controls and lame ideas such as odd-even rationing.

To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance.

I've been awed by the incredible opportunities that automatically float to the Harvard undergrads I once taught - from building homes for the poor in Nicaragua to landing prime White House internships.

I think every administration has a settling-in process. And there's always an adjustment between what you can say during a campaign and what you find are the possibilities and the imperatives when you win the election and you enter the Oval Office.

The Internet has done a wonderful thing for us. But democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time.

We must challenge this statement and this sentiment that the news media is the enemy of the American people. This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.

What I'm passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.